The Legend Of Zelda Majora's Mask - Review

From the moment I finished Ocarina of Time 3D I knew that they needed to do the same with Majora’s Mask, as one of my favourite Zelda games, it would shine on the handheld.

From the moment you start the adventure that is Majora’s Mask, things are darker than the previous game, Link sits upon Epona through a dark and eerie wood, with fog all around, but it is in this darkness, this strangeness that the game embraces that it finds itself shining just as brightly as Ocarina of Time.

Link sets off on a journey, to where we never find out, because in the aforementioned forest he is knocked from Epona and has both her and his Ocarina stolen and gives chase. After falling into a large pit, he comes to across from the Skull Kid and two Fairies, Tatl and Tael and then gets cursed. Turned into a Deku Scrub, Link has all of his normal moves swapped out for a new suite of abilities that include gliding and a new spin attack, as Link chases his attacker, he finds himself in the bottom of a tower, where he meets a mask salesmen, who explains that the Skull Kid stole that mask and it is full of evil power. He then states that he can assist you in returning to your original state if you help him get back his mask.

You are given three days to try and find the Skull Kid, as well as saving the rest of the world from the moon that is moving ever so closer to crashing into it. It is this three day cycle that helps set the game apart from every other Zelda game and gives it its strongest power. In all Zelda games since, there has been this notion of time, sunrises and sunsets, shops and world events happening at specific times, but with Majora’s Mask, the same three days looping over and over again gives you the chance to do things differently each time.

There are only 4 dungeons in this game, in the traditional sense for Zelda, but Clock Town is a dungeon all of its own. There are puzzles around the town that require to be solved, with a boss located in the centre at its highest point, items can be found and evil defeated. What makes this interesting is that you are not able to solve this Dungeon in the three days you have, each time you reset time, all the work you have done becomes undone and you must start again. So as you explore the town and learn about the goings on, when you come back again you can make a decision on who to help, on what tasks need your attention. Some quests can have you doing small parts each day, resulting in the final moments of the final day being all about that, of course resetting time and starting again can also make those solves harder to see.

But in order to fully save each of the citizens of Clock Town, you must venture out solve the issues plaguing the temples of this world, for in each temple is the spirt of a guardian who can help stop the moon from crashing down. Each of the temples resides in a major direction on the compass and each requires you to solve puzzles to gain access to them, the first temple, located in a Swamp, requires you to learn a song from a captured monkey, but as you progress through the game, you will need to heal the souls of heroes and then solve issues before you can enter the temple. It is this nature of exploration that makes the world feel larger by comparison to Ocarina of Time, here you need to solve lots of things before you enter the temple and there you just needed an item to do it.

Clearing the temple will result in the area it is located in being purged of the evil that surrounded it, with the swamps poison being replaced by blue waters, the snow covered Goron village now enjoying a beautiful spring. The flip side to this is that each time you reset the three days, you again undo all that work, which results in everything going back to the bad way it was before. Of course, you only really need to clear each temple once, so it is not a huge issue. Throughout the course of the game, anyone who has experience the original game will notice what tweaks were made to the 3D remastering and while some are major, there are few minor ones that just help things flow better.

One example would be the location of the Stone Mask, in the original release, the soldier who had it was in the entry way to Ikana Valley, but now he is in the Pirates Fortress, which makes it easier on the player getting the stone mask, while the requirements to get it have not changed just the location. It is small changes like that make the game feel fresh again. The swimming controls have been changed, alongside the Goron Roll, but while they are different they are not bad.

The biggest area the game has been touched up in are the visuals, the game looks amazing, of course while it won’t win any beauty awards stacked up against any game made in the past few years, it is leaps and bounds ahead of what Ocarina looked like with its remastering. The waters of the Great Bay look amazing, getting down to the bottom near the Zora Cape and seeing the coral there is pretty great, but just as equally so is Termina field, it now feels fuller, trees are not as flat anymore, the lights from the Clock Town walls at night seem to shine just a little more brighter now than they did before.

If you played the game when it first released but have not revisited Termina since, you should find the time to go now. The game has been polished and tweaked so that all that was wrong the first time around feels better now. Plus the game has fishing now, did I mention the fishing?

The Score

8.5

Review code provided by Nintendo

The Pros

+Gameplay still holds up

+Remastered visuals are a real treat

The Cons

-The three day count and looping, may not be for everyong

-Smaller temple count is still a bit of a letdown